How many links should you be building?

The more links you have pointing to your website the better, right? There is a big misconception that more is better.

No matter how many links your competitors have, you shouldn’t focus on quantity. You should focus on quality. A link from a site like CNN, assuming it is coming from a relevant section and article, will carry much more weight than 10 links from mom and pop sites.

In essence, I’m telling you that you should try to build as many high quality links as possible—ideally to internal pages versus your homepage.

Why internal pages? Well, it’s easier to build them to deep pages than to your homepage. Just think about it… would you rather link to an educational content piece published on an internal page or to a homepage that is selling a product or service? An internal page, right?

As for quantity, you won’t beat out sites that have 10,000 links using this tactic, but you will have many more authoritative links, which will help you outrank your competition.

How fast should you be building links to your website?

Assuming the links you are building are clean, you typically don’t have to worry about velocity. Even if you build many links fast, you should be fine in general.

But over the years, I’ve noticed a trend…mainly with new sites or websites with fewer than 100 links. If you build 500 links in the first 30 days to a brand new site, or to a site that doesn’t have more than 100 inbound links, you’ll notice that your rankings may drop temporarily.

Eventually, they’ll move up to a higher spot than their initial placement, but building too fast is unnatural. I don’t know how Google’s algorithm is programmed to deal with velocity, but this is at least what I have noticed over the last four to five years.

What happens if you build too many links too fast?

If you’ve built too many links too fast, don’t worry. You shouldn’t get hit with a Penguin penaltyor anything like that, assuming your links are high in quality, relevant, and aren’t rich in anchor text.

The only thing that might happen is that your search traffic might stay flat for a few months or maybe even dip a bit, but after three months, you should see a sharp climb in search traffic.

If you aren’t seeing a sharp climb in search traffic, it means either the links you built aren’t high in quality or you have thin content. If it’s neither of the two, then you need to add more pages to your website and adjust how you cross-link your internal pages.

Nonetheless, those are simple fixes that should lead to more traffic. Just don’t get nervous if you don’t notice an increase in traffic right away.

Even when you build high quality links, it usually takes three to six months for the results to start showing up. So if you are investing a lot of man-hours into link building, don’t get nervous or quit if you don’t see results within the first two or three months.

More information: http://www.quicksprout.com/